


So Gradual the Grace

by LittleRedCosette



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 01:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18789982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: The townies saw you coming from a mile away. You were pocket change entertainment, the candy floss stick tossed half eaten in the dirt. They saw you for what you were, the pieces you worked hardest to hide, shining through the cracks.Where do you go, when your sanctuary has turned to ash?





	So Gradual the Grace

**Author's Note:**

> Friends,
> 
> I’m breaking rules here. I’m breaking my (1) second person narrative rule, and also my (2) aimless character introspect rule, and also my (3) no MCU story rule. The first one is because I think it’s a frightening PoV. The second one is because, if you’ve read anything else of mine, you’ll know I toe the dangerous line of character introspect all too regularly as it is. The last one is mostly because if I start in on MCU, I’m worried I’ll never stop.
> 
> But I have thoughts that needed thinking so I’ve written them down here and I hope now I can return to my normal stories in peace, instead of spending a portion of each day thinking about the utterly harrowing opening scene of Avengers: Endgame, which is pretty much how my life has gone so far since seeing it.
> 
> Thanks for your time and your reading. I’ve kept this as MCU canon as I can manage, except obviously Hawkeye is deaf, because that is canon, even if MCU were lazy shits and did nothing about it. (Also I'm holding my hands up right now and admitting there's an intentional misspelling in this story.)
> 
> LRCx

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 _No Ordinance be seen_  
So gradual the Grace  
A pensive Custom it becomes  
Enlarging Loneliness.

**Emily Dickinson – Further In Summer Than The Birds**

.

.

She brought you back.

She found you.

.

.

She always found you.

.

.

There was the peregrine, with the clipped wings.

“You owe me, kiddo,” Barney said, tax man with eyes that matched the mirror shard you hid in your go bag, the way you’d stare at it, to find a scrape of the woman who kissed your chin when it got grazed.

“Could be a part of the show, kiddo,” Barney said.

He was five years older, but he passed for more when he stood straight.

“It’s not a hawk,” you said, frowning at the strangled ruffles of the bird’s thready feathers. As if that were the worst of it, as if that were the bottom line.

She was fragile, tiny. A quivering thing of peace in a violent territory.

Sacha, you called her. Tended to her pains and she nipped your fingers until they bled on the bow you’d hold in trembling palms, aching triceps too strong for your young bones.

Sacha, with her spider grey head and her shrieking yellow eyes. Her beak that tore at the tender ligaments of your hands.

She was a ruthless thing, a mean thing. She sought to break what you needed most, the tools of your very fingers.   You stroked her kindly and she responded with fury that stained you crimson.

They clipped her wings, before you found her.

She would never be part of the act. Maybe Barney knew that all along.

He was five years older, after all. He knew things, all kinds of things. The warm slice of a girl that owed him big and the taste of fermented yeast fizzy and flat in a capped bottle, the shape of that bottle broken in a man’s neck.

They clipped her wings and she bit your knuckles and it didn’t mean what you thought it meant.

.

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 _What the hell’s the matter with you?_ He asked, disgrace like a curse he could not rid himself of.

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She found you, every time.

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The first time you hear the words Avengers and Initiative in the same sentence, it’s standing a foot and half away from Phil Coulson, at a fifty-five degree angle from his six.

They’re debriefing after Minsk, which was actually in Hungary but you aren’t allowed to say as much.

(She’ll look at you, sometimes, at the space on your back where you used to have a full trapezius, and when you have to strain to shoot with your other hand from then on, she’ll never watch, even though you never miss.)

Nicky Fury stands tall but Coulson, he’s taller, in his own way. Quietude breeds stoicism and Coulson, he never flinches. Coulson makes them wait until medical have cleared you before you debrief, because you’re never worse than when you’re on fentanyl and you’ve got a poker face that will outlive most casinos.

They wait, and in the closed-up box of Pandora where Nicholas Fury hoards his intentions, they discuss an initiative of vengeance.

“Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, that’s a burden to bear,” Coulson says, almost like he doesn’t know a pair of shoulders broad enough to carry it.

(You won a 1945 original card when you were seventeen. Thought nothing of it, until it ended up in your personals ten years later, and Phil, he’d never flinched before, but he did, then. _It’s yours,_ you said, because what the hell were you gonna do with it? You’d only kept it out of spite to begin with.)

You stand, fifty-five degrees, staring at a fixed point in the wall but also at everything else, too.

Phil is calm, and only the way he holds his right hand in his left behind his back, instead of the other way around, gives his agitation away.

There’s something defensive about the way he tilts his head, not toward you but away.

You know that head tilt. You’ve seen it before, seen it a thousand times on a thousand men.

The first time you ever saw it, you lost your hearing for good.

.

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 _You don’t think I could keep up?_ You ask, a dull knife slashing through the air at Coulson’s dismissive aura.

And Coulson, those eyes that saw you better than anyone had before.

 _I think you could,_ he says to the contrary of his agent’s ire. It hurts, how sad he sounds when he says it.

.

.

The peregrine stayed with you for two months. Stayed until Jacques found out where the scraps of meat from your stew were going.

You buried her at the roots of a vast oak tree six times your age, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Ohio. You stuck an arrow in the dirt, with a sign attached that read:

_SACHA_

_A GOOD FREIND_

You’ll never know how long it stood for, or who found it. Who read it and took from your childish scribble something sacred, and true.

.

.

You’ve got a scar on your palm at the base of your left middle finger. A hooked curve, wicked and pale.

 _Got a mean drawback?_ Tony Stark asks, with a judgy eyebrow tone that speaks volumes of his thoughts on your place on the team, the big one, the big A. The Initiative.

 _Something like that,_ you agree, before flicking a paper crown at Butterfingers, where it lands on its reacher arm perfectly.

Tony builds you a better quiver, with a faster release and a hint of violet in the seam that matches your new hearing aids, and you accept it with verbal gratitude, and also something more sincere.

You bond over things you don’t speak of, things you read in each other’s files without permission or remorse.

.

.

She hits you really hard in the head, and your ears are ringing but she’s there, her killer’s hands and her mouth on your brow, where a mother might kiss, only, she’s not, and never will be, and you never ask but you think she’d have chosen otherwise, if she could have.

.

.

When Laura strokes your cheek, holds your jaw like a bruise in her cupped hand.

Her kisses are strawberries and corn, deep and reaching. You will love her as you have loved nothing else in this lifetime, or the one before. Your sanctuary, and your grace.

The person you _were_ belonged to others; but hers, hers is the person you want be.

.

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When they vanish, it’s exactly that.

There is no closure in an empty casket.

.

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It sickens you, the day you stop wishing they’d come back. When all you can wish for is that you’d held their corpses in your grasp, first.

.

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Sacha never flies, but that’s fine, because neither does Hawkeye. You flip and twist and turn. You somersault and you spin.

You’re a flightless predator, a bird of paradise without tail feathers. You spend years scrubbing glitter out of your hair every night and perfecting the smoky eye effect on your lower lids.

You learn the art of camouflage, how it's got nothing to do with khaki pants.

.

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You’re one of them.

You know their coffee orders and the way their breathing changes in their sleep; you know the rhythm of their gait and the range of their eyesight.

You know the names of Faraday’s children, and how they are family names from his mother’s line. You know about Stockton’s secret stash of marshmallows in her desk drawer. You know how many bullets Marques has taken in the line of duty.

You held Alverez’ hand while they clamped up her torn femoral artery, whispered into her ear nonsense for her to cling to in her fever dream. You promised you’d get her home, and you did.

You’re one of them, until you’re not.

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The townies saw you coming from a mile away. You were pocket change entertainment, the candy floss stick tossed half eaten in the dirt. They saw you for what you were, the pieces you worked hardest to hide, shining through the cracks.

.

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Laura presses her thumb into the scar on your hand. Kisses it, washes clean the sins stained upon your soul.

You hold your daughter in your arms and she holds your son.

You build a house for them, but she builds you a home.

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You’re one of them, until you turn on them, with a shard of blue in your eyes like the hand gestures your mother made when the world’s breath was silent and the money just wasn’t there to change it.

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There are jokes about hooded hawks, that leak in through the walls of your solitary confinement.

 _All you gotta do is speak to someone, Agent Barton,_ Fury says, just the once. You’ve never known him to repeat himself.

Maria Hill stops by. You are surprised by the grace of her apology, which feels unfounded and unearned.

She sits on the chair next to your bed. You lie on your front, dozing in the bath of pain meds that go some way to concealing the forty-nine stitches holding your back muscles in place. Your body armour glistened when they peeled it off you, and you made a joke about getting the spots out.

One of them catches you when you drop, and you don’t ask, but you hope to God it wasn’t Captain America.

They joke about hawks with hoods on, but you’re not hooded, that’s not the problem. Your wings are clipped, like they should have been from the beginning, and you think you get it, then, what Sacha had been trying to tell you all along.

The doctor checks in once a day. The head one, that is. She swings by with her tan shoes and her braids and her clear nail varnish. She offers her ears, which work perfectly fine.

You tell her, _I got nothing to say you haven’t heard before, Doc,_ which just isn’t true, because you can guaran-fucking-tee she’s never heard what it’s like to batter at the walls of your subconscious while your body surrenders to the will of a Norse God extremist.

There are jokes about how to hood hawks, and you can’t scratch at the itchy scabs forming from the glass indents in your back.

You heal, but you don’t talk, and they still don’t let you out.

.

.

To your dying day, you never know how she does it.

You wake up, ready to clamp your jaw tight for another round with your regular Sean Maguire, but it’s not.

 _Oh my Hawkeye,_ Laura says, the way only she’s allowed to, your sanctuary, your grace.

Behind your sanctuary, she stands like a sentinel, her hair scraped back off her face. She doesn’t smile at you, or reassure you, or make promises. She presses her middle three fingers to her palm, her thumb and pinky stretched out like bull’s horns, and she thrusts her hand down with demanding force.

She kept guard, then, before, and after, and you loved her for it.

.

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You loved her.

.

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 _What the hell’s the matter with you?_ She asked you, and you don’t know what you gave away but she must have seen something in your eyes, because she made sure never to say those words in that order to you ever again.

There was something about her, she broke your rules. She was antagonistic and paranoid and sad. Little more than a child when she nicked your throat with a thin steel blade and pinned you down with her hands on your wrists and her heels in your spine.

A few more pounds of pressure, she could have cracked your shoulders into splinters.

You breathed deep into the muck on the ground, tasted the pavement and a hundred years of footsteps in the dark. The city was restive, car lights and sirens. Your comms off, a sign of trust she had not asked for, and she said a word that you did not understand, but the tone was all too familiar, like the vowels in _carnie_ on a townie’s tongue.

She let go of your wrists and you let out a hollow, desperate sound as the spring of your muscles pulled back into place. Livid pain in your joints, like the snap of a bowstring. You knew better than to move.

She was light as a cat standing on the plank of your body, a waiting whip.

And yet, you felt the tremor in her legs. You felt her shiver for just a moment.

It was enough.

You knew, then, as a thin rivulet of scarlet dripped down the cylinder of your throat, that you would not leave her behind.

You would never leave her behind.

.

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Except, you did.

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It goes something like this.

You say no, say it ten thousand times. Because it’s not who you are, not who you are prepared to be. You say no.

It’s Barney’s hand on your neck, the last thing you remember. His warm strength, which was once a shield between you and the strike of a belt buckle.

You feel Barney’s hand, his thumb pressed into base of your skull. It might have been kind. Before they jam an arrow in your ribs and another in your shoulder, and he holds you to the ground like a stuck pig.

They leave the splinters of your bow like a cross upon a grave.

You’re not dead though. You’re not ready for a grave.

You say no again, say no death. Your own, this time.

It goes something like this.

You survive, because survival is the best _fuck you_ that you can manage. You survive, even though it’s to the end of others. Your aim is true. Your arrows fly, the way they did when they were only amazing, and not deadly.

You get a new bow, and you call it _sacha._

.

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There are no laws of the universe that state that all the things you love will die before their time.

That’s not how it works.

That’s not how these things go.

Still, you think about it, sometimes.

You think about it.

.

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You loved her, and she knew it, and you wish it was enough.

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When they vanish, you scream their names for hours, until they are meaningless syllables.

Your little girl, her smile imprinted on your soul. There is no ache like being denied her presence.

When you pray, it is to nothing more nor less than the memory of her laughter, the way she said _Dad,_ with a humbling kind of wonder.

You sully her memory by killing in her name.

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Where do you go, when your sanctuary has turned to ash?

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It happens something like this.

You opt out. You take the shot, and the reverb hits. You drop from a nest like a cuckoo’s sibling.

They don’t take the opening.

A man in a suit tells you about choices. The ones you’ve made and the ones he’s going to give you.

He offers you choices and you don’t say anything, even though you can read his lips perfectly because he looks at you dead on when he speaks, like he knows.

He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out the aids you stashed in a house that was less than safe. Presents them in a cupped hand like diamonds, only, more precious by far.

You stare at him, and he stares back.

You’ve never been more frightened of anything than you are the unsolicited kindness of this stranger’s indifference to you and your blotted scarlet ledger. He sees more of you than you are willing to show.

He is not your grace, who sees the light. He won’t be your six, who sees the shadow.

He will see you the way you see best, from a distance. You are the big picture, from where he stands.

You learn his coffee order, eventually. The way his breathing changes when he sleeps. The rhythm of his gait and the range of his eyesight. You learn the way he writes his _k,_ in three separate strokes. You learn the way he eats boiled sweets, crunches them like an impatient child.

You memorise his important dates, and you tell him yours.

Every July 22nd, he finds a way to talk to you, even if it’s just a standard check-in. Even just those fifteen syllables mean everything on a day that scorches, that steals everything else.

There are other lifetimes, where you didn’t see that beautiful woman signing to her cousin across the bar; where you didn’t brave her approach, and you didn’t tell her she was pretty as snow in the starlight, and you didn’t fall in love with the way her hair felt between your fingertips.

You think, perhaps, in one of those other lifetimes, he might have been your grace.

.

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She was something else entirely.

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When they come back, you don’t sleep for three days.

If you blink, they might vanish.

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There’s a little girl who’ll grow up without her daddy, even though everything her daddy did was in the hope that she might live. You meet her, briefly. She takes to your daughter, who is good at braiding hair, and she’s such a bright spark that there’s no denying who she’ll grow up to be.

Her mother puts her hands on your shoulders and says _Thank you,_ just like she does everyone else that comes to the funeral.

It’s all you can do not to turn away in shame.

You kiss your daughter’s head, and you pick up your youngest son to put him safely on your back; you carry his weight to remind yourself he’s there. You remember how you thought, honestly truly thought, that they would be better off without you.

She knew how wrong you were, even then. She proves it to you now, beyond the grave that doesn’t exist, because you didn’t bury her. There’s no closure in an empty casket, and no words that could possibly be worthy of a gravestone anyhow.

You hike ten miles into the mountains, with the wide shadow of Bruce Banner for company. He sits beside you and tries to apologise, and you tell him how goddamn selfishly he hurt her when he left like that.

Bruce knows already, or else maybe he’s just not as easily scared off by the truth as you are.

You broke her heart when you left like that. You let her chase you across the planet and you pretended you didn’t want to be found, even though you did, because you knew she would.

She found you.

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You stand in the rain with a man’s blood on your sleeve and she looks at you the same way she did when she had your wrists behind your back, your shoulders stretched to popping.

.

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Your grace, your sanctuary. She kisses you, and says, _Come home,_ and says, _Come back._

.

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You look out the kitchen window one day, to the fields that are quiet and gold.

There’s an uninvited redhead standing in your yard.

You drop the plate in your hands, and soap slaps up the sides of the sink. The porcelain cracks and you swear, alarmed.

Laura opens the door, that twinkle in her eye that shooting stars can only aspire to. She invites her inside and offers her tea.

Wanda tries to apologise, but Laura won’t hear of it. You stare at her as if you’ve already forgotten her name, or the way she flinched back from you when you told her to take a stand.

(When her brother died, you thought the guilt would consume you, but it didn’t. Your capacity for it is a chasm. You never closed the abyss that that sceptre cracked open inside you. Her brother died and you lived, and you’ve learned how to take that, to shoulder it. Your shoulders, they’re broad, too.)

You sit together on the porch, as the sun nestles down into the horizon, tucked up like a nursery rhyme.

“I thought I had something to tell you,” she says.

You’ve progressed to beer. Tall thin bottles, you leave yours by your feet but she cradles hers in her hands, placed between her legs as she sits back and takes in the view.

“You here to chew me out?” you ask her, and she smiles, because she’s done that plenty before.

“I want to look out for you,” she says, like that’s something to ask permission for.

There’s a bunch of floorboards in the upstairs that need sanding, and six of the doors need new hinges. You've only half painted the east side of the woodwork and the barn hasn’t been cleaned out in way too long.

You pick up your beer and take a long pull, let it rinse out the taste of regret from your tangled tongue.

“But I think you’d mistake my intention,” she tells you.

You look at her, at the clarity of her eyes and the careful curl of her mouth.

You know her coffee order, and the rhythm of her gait. You’re not sure about the way her breathing changes when she sleeps, nor the range of her eyesight.

They’re not as important as they used to be.

You know the iron of her will and the strength of her resolve.

“It wouldn’t be because anybody asked me to,” she says, and that anybody sounds real lullaby lilac; there are six syllables in that anybody that you’ll dream of until you die.

“It would just be because I wanted to,” she says, and who are you to deny this woman what she wants?

To your left, the door swings back, and there is grace itself standing in the doorway.

“Only got pot roast for dinner, I’m afraid,” Laura says, and Wanda thanks her with the kind of sincerity that comes from honest humility.

“I’ll help set the table,” she says, as she gets up, beer in hand and the sunset splashing over her, setting her ablaze.

“Oh, the kids are gonna love you,” Laura says as she leads the way into the house.

You sit a while longer, with the sun on your face. Your children are bickering, and it’s harder to get mad at them now than it used to be. There’s just relief, an abundance of it. You could listen to them argue for days.

You sit a while, until it would be rude to sit any longer. You follow them inside, where there is warmth, and grace.

.

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She found you, every time. Brought you here, to this place.

Your north star, and your six.

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“You don’t believe me yet,” you told her, on the ground with the rain hitting your side and your shoulders hurting bad. “But you can trust me.”

.

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She did.

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End file.
